Tag Archives: Caribou

Animals

The last 33 caribou: fighting for the survival of a Wet’suwet’en herd

By Matt Simmons, The Narwhal, Local Journalism Initiative reporter

There’s a serene pocket of mountainous habitat in northwest B.C. where 33 caribou live, drinking from glacial-fed creeks and grazing on alpine lichens. Though it’s peaceful, they have nowhere to go. They’re surrounded.

They’ve been cut off from where they gave birth to their young and the tracts of land that supported them through the long northern winters by highways, hydroelectric dams, rail lines, clearcuts and farmland. The herd’s range has been fragmented for more than a century and faces imminent threats.

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Animals, Energy

Caribou at the crux of culture and industry

By Lawrie Crawford, Yukon News, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Reconciling industrial and environmental interests is a continual problem for the Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment Board (YESAB).

Projects have quickly become controversial when caribou are involved. BMC Minerals’ Kudz Ze Kayah project affecting the Finlayson herd is now before the courts for judicial review; Western Copper and Gold’s Casino project in Klaza caribou territory is now into its eighth year of assessment; and conditions have been recently imposed on Fireweed Zinc to mitigate effects of their drilling program on the Tay River caribou herd. Conditions for Fireweed’s project in the MacMillan Pass included that “if caribou are observable within one kilometre of active work areas, activities shall cease until the caribou have moved away on their own accord.”

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Energy

Proposed B.C. coal mine gets axed over ‘significant’ environmental effects

By Natasha Bulowski, Canada’s National Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

The federal and British Columbia governments have rejected a proposed open-pit coal mine over its environmental impacts.

The Sukunka open-pit coal mine near Tumbler Ridge, B.C., would have produced three million tons of coal per year to sell to steel manufacturers overseas, according to Glencore, the company behind the project. The federal government announced the rejection — based on B.C.’s environmental assessment process — on Dec. 21. 

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Energy, Environment, Rivers & Oceans

B.C. will soon decide the fate of four projects with big climate and biodiversity impacts

By Matt Simmons, The Narwhal, Local Journalism Initiative reporter

B.C. Premier David Eby’s newly appointed cabinet is about to decide the fate of a handful of proposed projects,  each of which comes with a slew of implications to biodiversity and  climate. 

While provincial ministers wrestle with the decisions, delegates from across the country and around the world are gathered at COP15,  the United Nations biodiversity conference in Montreal. The aim of the  conference is to secure government commitments to slow the global  biodiversity crisis underway — the crisis is sometimes referred to as  the sixth mass extinction and is the first to be human-caused.

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